It’s Swag Swensday! That’s when we kick down some sweet, sweet swag to Autopian Members, the cool-kids club for car people that you really should have joined already. What’s the holdup? You can get in on the fun with a Cloth Tier membership for a mere seven bucks a month (or break off $50 to cover the year, which works out to way less than five dollars a month). There’s even more fun with the Cloth, Velour, and Rich Corinthian Leather tiers. Become an Autopian Member today!
You may recall that our last Swag Swensday was devoted to Hot Wheels cars, which I have too many of. Surprise: I still have too many of them, so I’ll dispense with a fresh gang of cars today. But this time, we’ll do Matchbox models – which really may as well be Hot Wheels since Mattel owns both brands, but Mattel does a pretty good job of giving the Matchbox brand its own identity based on the selection of cars assigned to the brand, and the way they’re packaged – little boxes, specifically. Not exclusively in boxes, but there are boxes!
I’m old enough to remember scoring genuine pre-Mattel, Lesney-made Matchbox cars at the long-gone Ben Franklin store in Bristol, RI. My other go-to toys were green army men, Guillows gliders, and the occasional rubber snake, but mostly I went for the little boxed cars.
The brand had updated its cars with Superfast wheels by the time I was a customer, so I found Matchbox to be indistinguishable from Hot Wheels (which Ben Franklin also carried), but something about those boxes and the big reveal of opening the package really did it for me. They just hit different, as the kids say.
And so, I still like picking up boxed Matchbox cars if the subjects are interesting. And now I’ll enjoy sharing some with you. Autopian Members, watch your mailboxes, these Matchbox cars may be coming your way!
Not a Member? Gee whiz, get with the program. Join today!
The boxes are also easier to store than Hot Wheel’s bubble packaging.
Most of mine are gone though, The tabs would break eventually from all the opening and closing.
I was always more of a Matchbox guy than a Hot Wheels guy. When I was a kid in the 80’s, Mattel/Hot Wheels was going through a hard time. The axles would bend if you looked at them funny, and the car would ride on these stupid little humps cast into the chassis so that the car wouldn’t completely collapse. Why it was more cost effective to cast those humps in, instead of use a better axle/suspension I will never understand.
Matchbox, on the other hand, had a beautiful sproingy suspension that was so much fun to play with, and were tough as nails. This was back before Mattel owned both brands.
I agree Mattel has done a good job giving Matchbox their own identity. Hot Wheels makes the wild and crazy things, where Matchbox lives in a much more realistic realm. As such, they are still my preference. Of course, I’ve always had LOTS from both brands. I couldn’t tell you how many diecasts I have today, but it’s at least a thousand and could certainly be a lot more.
If any of y’all find a yellow B15 Nissan Sentra, especially a SE-R, especially especially a Spec-V, please scoop it for me and I will gladly buy it from you with a healthy finder’s fee.
The little white boxes are part of what I love about Takara Tomy cars too.
Mk1 Golf Plz!
Matchbox cars from Ben Franklin! Buying those was a thing I was still able to do until recently as the town I live in had one of the last remaining Ben Franklins in the state. What a great place – it had more variety and much better customer service than the two Dollar Generals that have since replaced it. They also ran some really great specials around Christmas and had a deal where if you called and told them what grade your kid was going into, they’d have all of the school-required supplies waiting in a sack for you when you arrived.
I have the 914, the Fiat, and several versions of that ’59 Dodge up there. They always seem to get me with their five packs having the “only available color” of some car I have to have sitting on my desk that day. The latest was this ’75 Eldorado. Earlier examples have included a Citroen DS and Mercedes 300TD. There are usually at least one or two others that my daughter takes for her collection, and anything else goes to one of my renters’ kid.
When I was a kid I gravitated towards Hot Wheels slightly more, but the gold standard, at least when I could find them, were the Tomicas – the actual suspension was great and the proportions always seemed dead on. I still have their ’76 Cadillac ambulance and ’78 Jaguar XJS in my collection from those days.
I had the freeway gas tanker as a kid. For some strange reason, that was my favorite car. And, I was always a fan of Matchbox more than Hot Wheels.
Gay Gasp!! I want that sweet sweet Volvo! <send/receive, send/receive, send/receive>
Time for some Carl Perkins, then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTA8m_luor4
I hate the Beatles mostly. But I’ve got a favorite Beatles song. And it’s the cover of this Carl Perkins song.
Now I need to find one of those RX 500s. Thanks, dammit.
“Powered by ROTARY”!!!
Sweeeet! I was always a Matchbox guy, though I didn’t turn my nose up at Hot Wheels. I still prefer the cardboard boxes to plastic bubble packs.
I also preferred the stock, older cars to the weird hot rods and new stuff. I was not a normal child, but an Autopian hatchling.
Will watch my mailbox. Here’s hoping.
I was always a Hot Wheels kid, but never turned down a cool Matchbox, or Corgi, or Burago, or Tomica. As a child of the 1980’s (born in ’75), I, too, preferred the everyday cars that were miniaturized instead of the wacky concepts that I saw and thought to myself, “There’s no way Chevy can make that!” LOL. Perhaps I was an Autopian in the making as well….